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A heated row has erupted between parents and teachers after the introduction of unisex toilets in a new school building.
The £12million building at Buxton School in Leytonstone, east London, has been equipped with same-sex toilets for pupils over the age of eight.
Executive headteacher Kath Wheeler welcomed the introduction of full-height unisex cubicles, while younger children use toilets in or attached to their classrooms.
The ringleaders of the “Trojan Horse” plot to impose conservative Islamic values on state schools in Birmingham are back in teaching, despite being banned from the classroom, an investigation by The Sunday Times has established.
Tahir Alam and Razwan Faraz are running informal classes — Faraz in a different city and under a false name.
A third figure who helped run a Trojan Horse school, Mohammed Ashraf, has become secretary of a local constituency Labour Party. He has applied to be a Labour council candidate at the next local elections, but claimed last night he had dropped the application. Ashraf was a governor at Golden Hillock School, which banned the teaching of some subjects and segregated boys and girls. He was later removed from the post.
Submissions by abortion campaign groups to the citizens’ assembly will not be fact-checked before they are passed on to the 99 members examining the need for a referendum on abortion law.
The forum will meet today and tomorrow in the Grand Hotel Malahide in Dublin. Its members will hear from an expert panel this weekend, which will outline the history of abortion in Ireland, the present practice, and how to consider the ethical issues. Ms Justice Mary Laffoy, who is chairing the assembly, has also invited submissions from campaign groups and citizens.
So far, 600 submissions on the Eighth Amendment have been received, from organisations and from individuals, including women who recounting their experiences of unplanned pregnancies.
The Citizens’ Assembly has received 600 public submissions relating to abortion, ahead of its first discussion on the topic this weekend – some of which have come from abroad.
The assembly’s 99 members drafted from the general public will convene in the Grand Hotel in Malahide for its first full-day meeting on Saturday, along with chairwoman Ms Justice Mary Laffoy, and there will be a further half-day session on Sunday.
The first four weekends of presentations and deliberations between November and March will focus solely on the topic of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which recognises "the right to life of the unborn, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother".
An extremist has a guiding role at a Muslim school where teenage girls have to cover all but their eyes, the Mail has discovered.
Hadhrat Shaykh Maulana Adam Sahib – who appears to condone 'striking' students – is the founder and 'honorary patron' of the full-time girls' school.
Britain’s home secretary is being urged by MPs to allow refugees from the Yazidi community, a minority Iraqi group persecuted by Islamic State, to enter the UK under the same rules that allow entrance to vulnerable Syrian refugees.
In a letter to Amber Rudd (pdf), a cross-party group of MPs has said that many Yazidi refugees from Iraq satisfy the “vulnerability criteria” of Syrian refugees due to the sexual violence they have experienced. However, their needs are at risk of being forgotten amid the humanitarian crisis caused by the military offensive in Mosul, the MPs warned.
The UN has condemned the murder, rape, torture and sexual slavery of Yazidis in Syria and Iraq, perpetrated by Isis, as genocide.
Monday
It has been a week of big contrasts. On 14 November we marked and reflected upon the 76th anniversary of the bombing of Coventry during World War Two and the destruction of the old cathedral.
I began with an early phone call to the Archbishop of Hong Kong. We ran through the various problems: war and suffering. Then straight to a meeting of 80 rabbis and priests, launched by the Chief Rabbi and me at Lambeth Palace. The agenda for the day included some areas of tension, such as historic anti-Semitism in the Church and Israeli settlements. It was good to discuss the reality of tough issues for a change.
So farewell, then, Anjem Choudary. For two and half years at least. On September 6, the radical cleric was sentenced by a British judge to five and a half years in prison for encouraging people to join the Islamic State. If he behaves himself in prison he could be out in half that time, although whenever he emerges, it is unlikely that it will be as a reformed character. But the law has taken its course and in a rule-bound society has responded in the way that a rule-bound society ought to behave -- by the following due process. So it is useful to compare the experience of Anjem Choudary and the way in which the state has responded to him with the way in which it has responded to another person.
The far-right mayor of a southern Hungarian village has banned the open expression of Islam, including the building of mosques and wearing of veils and headscarves, as well as the promotion of same-sex marriages.
In a post on Facebook, Laszlo Toroczkai, mayor of Asotthalom, a village near the Serbian border, outlined the proposals adopted by his council after a session on Wednesday.
All board members voted for the new rules, with only two abstentions.
British abortion activist Ann Furedi’s new book “The Moral Case for Abortion” has received a lot of media attention since its release earlier this year.
The CEO of the abortion chain British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Furedi attempts to argue that an abortion — which she readily admits is an act of killing – is a moral action and should be a legal choice for women at any stage of pregnancy.
But her arguments fail on multiple levels, Catholic World Report’s Fiorella Nash points out in her review of Furedi’s book. Nash says there are numerous flaws with Furedi’s arguments, and her zeal on the matter is similar to that of a religious "fundamentalist."